Epitome: The Democracy Foundation

Harnessing the intellect of millions of minds to solve society's’ most pressing problems, without the need for rulers or representatives.

The Problem

The decisions that define our future are not made by us. Due to restrictions in proximity, lack of time and space, or poor organization, we are forced to assign the decision making of our societies to one or a small group of individuals. However, legislators and representatives are also constrained by time, location, and space, with only a few able to take part in decision-making at a time, and that by itself is a time-consuming and inefficient process.

Additionally, the outsourcing of our most vital power, the ability to collectively decide the future of our societies, results in major problems with corruption, manipulation, and exploitation, as well as depriving us of the enormous potential of utilizing the multitude of minds in our society to detect issues and crowdsource solutions.

The Solution

Technology has provided us with an unprecedented ability of rapid information processing and both real-time and asynchronous connectedness which renders the collaboration among large populations feasible. Our endeavor is to enable individuals to participate in the decision-making process of their societies and communities in ways that will evolve our current potential and accelerate progress to a degree previously unattainable.

To achieve that, we are developing instruments that assess popular will through innovative and advanced methods, in contrast to today’s primitive and restrictive tools. Not only do we aspire to liberate people from having to rely on representatives, but we focus on evolving the decision-making process to be more efficient and engaging, resulting in superior quality, and representation.

One such instrument, currently in development, is Epitome.

Epitome is a free and open-source online platform of mass deliberation and consensus decision-making that allows users to identify issues, crowdsource solutions, collectively improve them, and finally select the ones they prefer the most. This whole process is managed entirely by the members, eliminating needs for representatives, administrators or intermediates of any kind.

Societies, universities, corporations, organizations and in general any form of community can use Epitome as their decision making tool. The platform automatically adjusts to the initially-implemented population size, and continuously scales and adapts to altered parameters. Epitome is not a closed and final product, but a collection of numerous, out-of-the-box options and systems for societies and communities to customize to their own accord.

Planned Use Of Funds

Any funds collected from this competition will be invested in hiring programmers to aid in the development of Epitome.

When we reach our first stable version, we will distribute it freely and help communities install it, as well as listen to their feedback on future changes/features. Epitome as well as any instruments/resources we create will always be free for everyone.

One additional future implementation of Epitome that we will initiate once we develop a stable version using the funds provided by this competition, is a worldwide expert community, composed of academics and researchers, that will enable the identification and solution-proposal of global challenges. Due to the fact that the global challenges that we face today are complex, comprised of many individual sub-components, and span across many fields of knowledge, it is impossible for a few hundred lawmakers or ambassadors to keep up with all the global incidents and the latest research in each field. The implementation of our system constituted by academics, will ensure that the most knowledgeable individuals can effectively identify and propose solutions.

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Welcome to Shared Nation

We are a group of concerned people who, since 2014, have come together on a regular basis to think about the question of how we might bring together millions of people to aggregate their resources to have a more rapid, significant impact on shared global problems.